[Koha-devel] How about a different way of handling database updates

[Frederic Demians]

Those kind of things can be tricky and messy. Something like a 
dependency graph would be required, which is all but easy to implement. 
It has something to do with how patches are applied with git: order 
matters. 'git log --graph --pretty-oneline' displays s a representation 
of this order. Git manages pretty well its infamous 'conflicts' when 
merging branches, applying patches. Not sure it's possible to do that 
properly with DB updates.

My opinion is that the current system is not that bad. The dependency 
graph is linear, date ordered by version number last digits. It just 
becomes crazy when updates are ported from one branch to the other, HEAD 
to maintenance for example. And there is (am I wrong?) to claim 
'communitly' such a number:

    http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:dbrevs:start 

It should be used systematically.

Extracting updates code from updatabase.pl script and putting it into a 
directory containing files named by version number could be a 
simplification: easier for RM to rename those files if required, not 
sure. It remains kohastructure.sql...

--
Frédéric